Alexei Maximovich Peshkov (1868–1936), popularly known as Maxim Gorky (Russian: Максим Горький), was a Russian writer and political activist. He was nominated five times for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Before his success as an author, he travelled widely across the Russian Empire changing jobs frequently, experiences which would later influence his writing.

Gorky's most famous works are a short story collection 'Sketches and Stories' (1899), plays 'The Philistines' (1901), 'The Lower Depths' (1902) and 'Children of the Sun' (1905), poem 'The Song of the Stormy Petrel' (1901), autobiographical trilogy 'My Childhood', 'In the World', 'My Universities' (1913–1923), and novel 'Mother' (1906). Though Gorky himself judged some of these works as failures, most are now seen as masterpieces.

Some of his less-known post-revolutionary works such as the cycles 'Fragments from My Diary' (1924) and 'Stories of 1922–1924' (1925), and novels 'The Artamonov Business' (1925) and 'The Life of Klim Samgin' (1925–1936), Gorky himself was more proud of; the latter is considered Gorky's masterpiece and sometimes being viewed by critics as a modernist work. Unlike his pre-revolutionary writings (known for their "anti-psychologism"), these differ with an ambivalent portrayal of the Russian Revolution and "unmodern interest to human psychology" (as noted by D. S. Mirsky).